* Storage Decisions announcements
At Storage Decisions last week, ExaGrid, ProStor Systems, OnStor and Emulex unveiled enhancements to their products.
ExaGrid announced that its disk-based backup product now provides twice the backup and restore performance of previous versions. ExaGrid 3.0 now also includes the availability to perform a 20TB backup.
ExaGrid 3.0 provides post-process duplication in which data is written directly to the disk at 2.1TB per hour. The company claims that users can achieve restore throughput of 1.5TB per hour. With 3.0, users can now combine four 5TB ExaGrid servers into one virtualized grid. ExaGrid 3.0 supports CA ARCserve, CommVault Galaxy, Symantec NetBackup, EMC Networker, VMware Backup and Microsoft SQL Dump backups.
ProStor too announced new capacities for its removable disk media. Now 300GB of information can be stored on the RDX removable disk. The company expects to release an RDX disk cartridge with a 500GB capacity in 2008. The new 300GB RDX is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year from Tandberg and Imation.
Emulex became the first vendor to add authentication to its host bus adapters (HBA). The company added DH-CHAP to its 4Gbps LightPulse Fibre Channel HBAs and plans to also support it on its 8Gbps HBAs, scheduled for next year. The Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP) calls for the deployment of authentication – by incorporating DH-CHAP authentication, Emulex is able to protect an additional access point into the storage-area network and ensure that name spoofing or host masquerading don’t take place.
Most switch vendors including Cisco and McData are believed to use DH-CHAP in their implementations. The Emulex implementation is expected to be available next month.
Finally, OnStor expanded its line of clustered network-attached storage appliances to include an even larger array, the Pantera 5000. The Pantera 5000 doubles the storage capacity of the previous Pantera 2000 and supports up to 112 drives per RAID controller. It allows the clustering of eight nodes to a capacity of 672TB. In ONStor implementations, a global namespace spans all the nodes in the cluster, allowing users to manage their storage environment from a single console. The Pantera 5000 is available now starting at $125,000 for a two-node cluster with 24TB of storage.
